The History of the Warren Line

Extracted from A Collected History of the Most Prominent Witch Familes from the Fifteenth Century to the Present Day, 2027 Edition.

The Warren line of witches began when Charlotte Warren gave birth to her daughter Melinda Warren on October 31st, 1670, while Charlotte had no powers of her own the same could not be said for Melinda herself as at the time of her birth there had been a great many prophecies about her birth and her life, and what would come after her life.

Melinda was the first known witch in the Warren line to actually have magic, along with the same ablities that all witches have at their disposal of spell casting, potion brewing and scrying she had her own unique powers of moving things with her mind, what was thought at the time to be the power to freeze time and finally the power to see the future.

Melinda and her Mother lived in Salem, Massachusetts where Charlotte worked as a washer woman until she died at the age of fifty-three from what was more than likely a case of ovarian cancer, leaving Melinda on her own at the tender age of seventeen. Melinda moved in with her neighbours after the death of her mother,

It is generally agreed that it was during this period that Melinda began her Book of Shadows, a blanket term for the tomes where witches collect their knowledge be it spells they have used in the past, information about demons and various other forces of evil, the recipes for potions and even stories and songs from the witches of their family and friends.

Some accounts suggest that the Warren Book of Shadows had actually, despite popular myth, not been started by Melinda Warren herself and was in fact started by the witches of the coven who had taken in her Mother in order to ensure that she was protected and born into the world. How true these accounts are is a matter of great debate among numerous scholars in the magical world.

But whatever the truth of it, the Warren Book of Shadows had truly began to grow in this period, to take shape into the great tome that it would one day become. Most of Melinda's own entries into the book were more about the basic workings of magic and her own musings as to how she thought that her powers worked rather than any spell or potion entries, though those did start to appear towards the end of her life.

While from Melinda's own perspective the evils that she faced must have felt great indeed, with the benefit of hindsight we can see that at least the magical evils were not so great as her descendents would face. Warlocks were the most common threat in her time as during this era in history the vast majority of demons stayed in the Underworld.

Of course, it was the mortal threats that Melinda faced that would bring about her end. The Salem witch hunts have come to define our world perhaps more than any other event, at least in mortal history. Mortal women were accused of being witches and tried and executed with no more evidence that they actually were witches that some of them knew something of herbcraft, midwifery, and some dared to own land.

Melinda was of course an actual witch, but she knew well how to hide both herself and other witches from the gaze of the witch hunters while doing all that she could to protect the residents of Salam, magical and otherwise, from them. Among those she protected was her own daughter Prudence Warren who at the year of her mother's death was all of seven years old.

Melinda had been captured by the witch hunters, after being betrayed by her lover Matthew Tate, a warlock with the rare power of power copying, when a power was used on him by another magical being he was able to copy it and use it like it was his own. However, his victory was a short lived one as not long after he turned Melinda in he was cursed into a locket by his lover for the rest of time.

As Melinda was tied to the stake and about to be burnt, she spoke out a prophecy of three sisters that would become the most powerful witches that the world would ever know, that even if the Witch Hunters killed her they would never be able to rid the world of magic. It was something of a small victory all things considered as it did not save her from the flames but it did prove to the Witch Hunters that in the end, their efforts would be for nothing.

It had been the subject of great debate, why Melinda did not use her powers to save herself. It would not be hard for her to do after all, she could simply freeze the hunters and then use her telekinesis to escape her bounds and then run. Some early theories suggested that Melinda might have been tortured to the point of such weakness that she did not have the strength to use her powers to escape.

However, a later theory, supported by the testimony of Piper and Phoebe Halliwell about the events where they had needed to summon the spirit of their ancestor in order to help them and their late sister and part of the original Power of Three, Prue, with Matthew Tate who had been let out of the locket by Prue who had not been aware of what it was, was that Melinda choose of her own free will not to escape.

If she had used her powers, then it would be all the proof that the Witch Hunters needed that her own daughter Prudence was also a witch and she would be following her Mother to the flames after her if that was indeed the case. Some have wondered how this could truly be the case as while she had been tied to the stake Melinda had confessed to being a witch as she had burned and thus surely that would have been evidence enough as to Prudence being a witch.

Again, it is a matter to which we have very few solid answers to but according to the records that survived to the present day it seemed that the Witch Hunters never conducted any futher investigation into Prudence so perhaps they had simply dismissed Melinda's final words on the stake as those of a woman who had been consigned to death and thus was simply trying to hurt them with her last words.

Regardless of the truth, the life of Melinda Warren came to an end that day and the Warren line would continue through her daughter.

Prudence's father was Michael Wentworth, while he did know that Melinda was a witch before they were married according to most of the accounts from the time, it seemed that he had never truly been able to find comfort with the idea of it, with the idea that his wife used magic that everyone in his world told him was unholy, that his daughter would have the same powers and she would also be under constant attack by the same evils that had tormented them for years and years.

And so, almost one entire year before the witch hunts began Michael left his wife and daughter and he also seemed to vanish from history, this meant that Prudence did not have an obvious place that she could go but her Father did have a sister that still lived in Salem, thought according to one of Prudence's diaries which had been found in nineteen eighty-five, she had not been please to take the girl in.

The Book of Shadows was of course passed down to Melinda's daughter, Prudence hated magic by this point not only because that it, in her view, had driven her Father away but that it had also caused the death of her Mother but she did not get rid of the book, perhaps because it was truly the only thing of her Mother that she had left but she kept the book well hidden.

It is a sad fact that in the way her Father had proven to be right as it did not matter if Prudence wanted anything to do with magic or not as demons or warlocks came after her and she was thus forced to use her powers to defend herself from them. Prudence had inherited two of her mother's three powers, the power to move objects with her mind and the power to freeze.

Her Telekinesis was not very strong, or at least not as strong as her Mother's had been but her Molecular Immobilization was said to be even stronger than her Mother's had been and thus that became her primary power. When it came to the Book of Shadows, Prudence added the least amount of new entries to it than almost any other Warren witch, the only ones that did not add more than her did not have access to it.

Aside from the warlocks and demons who would attack her every now and then Prudence got her wish and lived an almost entirely normal life, and by the time she was a young woman she fell in love with and married John Marchant, a spice trader and three years after being married they had a daughter together that they named Cassandra.

The family lived togeter in comfort for the first seventeen years, but when Cassandra turned eighteen the family began to fray at the seams. Cassandra recived her power when she was four years old, the power of Premonition. Since the day that she had gotten it, she saw visions of innocents suffering and dying while her Mother did nothing to stop it.

Prudence had told her daughter to ignore her visions, and even offered to bind her powers with a potion form the book but that did not to appeal to Cassandra as not only did Cassandra easily accept that she was a witch but she had also grown to love magic and even if she had wanted to bind her powers, she pointed out that innocents would still be suffering while they did nothing to stop it.

This situation lasted for half a year with neither Mother or Daughter giving an inch, until one night Cassandra took the book and ran away from her Mother to New York, changing her last name to Smith once she had arived. Prudence was devasted by the absence of her daughter, the following year she contracted the flu and passed away while her husband remarred and had three sons with her.

What reaction that Cassandra had to the news of her Mother's death or her Father's remarriage or the birth of her three half-brothers, we will never knew. While we do have all of her journals that survived to the modern day, the earlist was only started after she had been settled in New York for a year. It seemed that she liked to leave the past in the past and focused instead on the future, a trait common in Witches whose gifts allow them to precive the future in one way or another.

While Cassandra did not have any offensive power, she had other ways to make up for that. Her skill at potion making was said to be unrivalled and almost all of her entries into the book were potion recipes, perhaps the most fameous being the recipe for a potion that could vanquish Upper Level demons that required a piece of the demon's flesh in order to work. All in all, Cassandra added close to one hundred entries to the Book of Shadows.

Cassandra never married, why this was is again another matter of the Warren Family that comes under some great debate. Some have suggested that the reaon she did not do so, was that she had heard the stories from her Mother how her Grandmother had been abandoned by her husband which had lead to her being driven into the arms of the warlock who had betreayed her to the witch hunters and Cassandra wished to avoid this fate.

Others have suggested that Cassandra believed that her Mother had been made weaker by marrying and that it had been her Father who had pushed for her to be more normal and thus ignore innocents in need, there is little to no evidence to support this and we have it in Prudence's own hand her distaste for magic and her desire to be normal.

Other theories range from Cassandra having a vision that she would be murdered by the man she married and thus tried to avoid that by never marrying or that Cassandra had been a lesbian and thus she did have someone that she wished to marry, but she was not able to do so but this is unlikely even if it can not be disproven.

Whatever the truth, Cassandra never married but she did have encounters with men in her time, and two of these said encounters resulted in the birth of a child. Lucy was the first child born to her, and following her two years down the road was Jennifer. While the two were half sisters, Cassandra never allowed them to think of each other that way. They were sisters, nothing else.

Lucy inherited the power of Telekinesis, she was quite skilled with it and also proved to be a talented spell writer while Jennifer displayed the power of Empathy, making her the first witch in the Warren line that did not have one of the three powers that Melinda Warren had and Cassandra had speculated that the power had come from being an offshot of her own premonition power.

The family lived together in New York together for twenty years where they became a great force for good and vanquished hundreds of demons, warlocks and other forces of evil but it did put a great strain on them through out the years and while some familes manage to pull together and grow stronger from such strain, Cassandra and her daughters were sadly not such a family.

It started small, as it often did but by the end Lucy and Jennifer could not stand to be in the same room as one another and they had a great many arguements almost daily, Cassandra did her best to bring her daughters back together or at least to get them to agree that the needs of innocents came before themselves but it did not seem to be enough.

Jennifer was the first to leave, she left a note but we do not know what it said as Lucy had apprently burned it as soon as she had finished reading it. Lucy herself remained in New York with her Mother for another year but in the end, she left to go and live on her own as well and like her Mother had once down to her own she took the book for her own before stealing away into the night.

For Cassandra, losing the book was not much more than an annoyance at least according to her journals as she had long ago commited to memory all of the recipe's for her potions but the falling apart of her family had been a much deeper wound for her to bare and so she commited herself once again fully, to hunting demons and warlocks.

It was on the eve of her sixtieth birthday when a demon named Assunta arrived in New York, an upper-level demon who had been one of the Source's assassins and who had been sent to deal with Cassandra personally. From the few eye witnesses who both knew the truth and survived the events, their battle was said to be the stuff of legends and the old warehouse where it had taken place was reduced to rubble. Cassandra's body was never found.

It is more than likely that her daughter's never became aware of their Mother's death, Jennifer had moved to Paris and with her great beauty and wit had made a reputation in the capital of France as a mysterious foriegn beauty who many men became obessed with and all of them tried to win her favour.

In the end, the one who managed to do was an aristocrat by the name of Anthony Bosquet and by the end of the first year together they were married and Jennifer had fallen pregnant. Nine months later, she brought a daughter into the world who would be named Pamela.

As Pamela grew, she began to recive her powers. First, came the power of Telepathy which more than like sprouted off from her Mother's empathic powers and then later on her power grew and she gained the power to turn invisible, an advancement of her telepathy which allowed her to reveal the hidden thoughts of others, she could not keep herself hidden from others.

Pamela had to learn how to be a witch on her own for the most part, as her Mother did not speak much of all about her own past and she did not have the book either but despite these set backs Pamela soon found herself growing to be an extremly powerful witch, and perhaps by some odd quirk of destiny found herself fighting evil as firecly as her grandmother and great-great grandmother had ever done before her.

Unfortunatly, her firceness in fighting against evil had gained her something of a reputation in the infernal courts of the Underworld and many came to believe that it would be Pamela's descendents, perhaps even her own daughters, that would be the Charmed Ones that Melinda Warren had spoken off as she burned to death in Salem and evil had a vested interest in stopping that from happening.

Thus, the Source sent one of his favourite assassin's to deal with Pamela. Shax was one of the Source's most loyal followers, the bastard child of a powerful demon and an air elemental who almost all demons in the Underworld lived in fear of. Shax was sent to Paris to kill Pamela and her parents.

The death of Jennifer and her husband happened fairly quickly as they had not been able to see Shax coming, Pamela was devasted when she learned of the death of her parents and grief manifested itself as a rage that would not cease no matter what, not until the demon that killed her parents was dead.

Sadly, as we know now the only way to vanquish Shax was with a Power of Three spell, while Pamela was a powerful witch she was not that powerful and while she was able to seriously wound Shax and forced him to retreat she was not able to kill him in their first encounter and with each following encounter, she hurt him less and less until finally she succumbed to the wounds that she recived from him during their last battle.

A demon that was interrogated by a coven of witches later spoke of the celebrations when word spread through the Underworld about Pamela's death. "It was like nothing that I've ever seen before, and I've been around the block once or twice. There was feasting, blood sacrifices, new powers being given to lesser demons in such excess that I'd never seen anything like it in my entire life. The witch is dead, the Charmed Ones will never be, good has lost!

The demon was vanquished not long after this.

Ignorant to all of this was Lucy, who had also left America by this point to move to Russia, she had the Book of Shadows with her as she had a much deeper appreciation for magic than her sister ever had and she spent most of her free time hunting demons and warlocks as well, though she never gained the same notoriety as her niece.

Like her Mother, Lucy eventually fell pregnant outside of wedlock but unlike her Mother, she felt great shame at what she had done.

She went to a chruch to beg for forgiveness from a god and a demon attacked her there while she had been praying, the only other person who had been in tnhe chruch at the time had been a nun who Lucy saved from the demon before vanquishing it. The nun, a sister Helena, when she learned that Lucy was a witch had been confused and conflicted but evntually she came to the conclusion that Lucy's powers were a gift from god and thus found her a job cleaning the church.

Nine months later, Lucy gave birth to twin girls but she only lived long enough to give them their names and to entrust them into Sister Helena's care before she died, more than likely having succumbed to an infection.

Her daughters, Helena and Agnes, were taken by Sister Helena to an orphanage which she had arranged to take over so she could offically oversee her adopted daughters care. As soon as they were old enough, Helena taught them how to speak and read in English and then when they began to show their powers, she showed them the Book of Shadows and told them of their birth mother.

While the sister did try her best, an orphanage can be a terrible place to live and it was that indeed for the sisters and it did not get any easier when the both of them discovered their powers. Helena possesed the powers of Premonition and later on gained the power to project her conciousness out of her body via the astral plane and Agnes had the power to manipulate heat, being able to both increase it as well as lower it.

The sisters gave themselves comfort by telling one another stories about how once they were both women, they would leave the orphanage behind them and would go to vanquish demons and save innocents as all of their family had done before them.

Alas, tragedy struck and Agnes, who had always been bullied more than her sister had done, struck out with her power at a group of children who were bullying her causing a fire to start in the top floor of the orphanage which caused the deaths of ten children, including Agnes.

Helena was devasted and withdrew into herself after the death of her sister, despite all the efforts of her namesake to bring her out of her shell, and even though her sister was gone when Helena finally reached adulthood she took the Book and what other few possessions that she had and left out into the world, ready to meet her destiny.

The next few years of Helena's life are somewhat obscure, there are no known records of this time and since Helena was spending this time learning all that she could about the craft she was keeping something of a low profile compared to her cousin at this time. Regardless, when Helena finally does reappear, she is a changed woman.

A young woman when she had left the orphanage, she is now a powerful witch in her own right whose powers had gown to greater heights, quiet literally as she had gained the power to levitate, and she had become quite the proficent spell caster as well and she had added her great knowledge of spells and rituals that she had learned during her time studying about the craft into the Book of Shadows.

During one of her demon hunts, Helena would meet her future husband, a man with no last name called Ivan. Ivan was a firestarter, a powerful magical being who had the ability to create great fires with nothing more than his mind's will alone, he had been on the run the Source for as long as he could remember.

Helena saved him from the trackers that the Source had sent after him and the two of them decided that it would be safer for the both of them to travel together, they had spent years together before they realised that their fondess and protectiveness had grown into something deeper with one another and thus they both decided to get married and settle down together.

Ivan built a home for the both of them far away from any center of civilization in order to keep themselves protected, they could scrounge for mushrooms, grew vegetables in their garden and could hunt for meat from the animals in the woods. Of course, they still went hunting for demons and Ivan made his own place in history by being the first spouse of a Warren witch to go on demon hunts.

Speaking of such, as neither Helena nor Ivan know of their own last name they both decided then to take the name Warren, which they had read about in the Book of Shadows as being the name of her ancestor Melinda Warren, and so decided to take it for themselves.

Over time Helena and Ivan had four daughters, the eldest they would name Brianna who would posses the power of Telekinesis, their second eldest they would name Astrid who had the power to levitate and also while only a witch would gain the power of Pyrokinesis which had brought into the family's magical pool via her Father, their third eldest they would name Patience who would have the power to freeze time and their fourth and final child, a girl named Beatrice who none expected to survive childhood due to only being born with one leg.

But survive Beatrice did and she possessed the powers of Telepathy and Empathy, the family of four lived together happily for a time and together they had slain many of the forces of evil but the peace did not last as it was now clear to the Underworld that they had been wrong, that it was not Pamela who would bring about the Charmed Ones but Helena's descendents instead.

So, a series of powerful demons were sent after them and while the family managed to vanquish most of them their would be one that would prove far too powerful for them to defeat. Tyron is a demon only spoken of whispers, down in the Underworld and many believe that he does not exist but the strongest evidence that we have is the attack on the Warren family.

The first attack was devasting as he was able to kill both Ivan and Patience before he was forced to retreat. Helena forced herself to be strong for her remaining daughters and brewed what was thought to be the most powerful potion in the book and spent hours working on a spell that she was certain would be able to vanquish Tyron and went to confront him.

Sadly, it was enough and Tyron managed to kill her and so it was only the three sisters left. Brianna, as the eldest, took charge and when Tyron came for them again held both of her sisters back with her power before she threw a potion at the demon's feet, shouted a few words in latin and then following a flash of bright both Brianna and Tyron were gone.

Both Beatrice and Astrid agreeded to leave Russia for America in the aftermath, as both had to many painful memories connected to Russia after the loss of the family and indeed the both of them were a reminder for the other of what they had loss and both decided to go their own way. Astrid, who had always wanted a normal life, agreed to give the book to her younger sister before she left her side.

Beatrice moved to Missouri where she lived in a small apartment over a liqour store, where she made and sold spells and charms. Beatrice had come to believe that if she had been given the power that she had, then she should be able to use it to do whatever she wished to do. Her powers made her even more dangerous as they grew and grew to the point that Beatrice could not only hear the thoughts and feel the feelings of others but indeed manipulate them.

Beatrice was thus able to use her powers to ensnare a wealthy plantation owner and suddenly, she had all the wealth and power that she thought that she rightly deserved but it did not seem to be enough for her as she began to torment the slaves of the plantation, using both spells and potions on them and using her powers to force their compliance.

Soon enough, Beatrice gave birth to a daughter that she named Ginny and she proved to be even more vicious than her Mother and her powers came to reflect that. She had the power to hypnotise others with little more than a word and with a thought she was able to inflict great mental pain on others, as well she was able to astral project as well as having standard telepathy.

Ginny managed to turn the plantation against Beatrice and she had them tie her Mother to a wooden stake in the middle of a field and burned her alive, leaving Ginny alone to rule the plantation as Queen of her own little world for years and years to come.

But, justice would come. Astrid may have wished to have nothing more than a normal life but she had heard what her niece had been doing through the supernatural grapevine and she could not allow her to continue on as she had been and so had travelled to the plantation in order to confront her.

Aunt and Niece joined in battle, and while Ginny was more than likely the stronger of the two of them as well as having the book Astrid remembered all that her Mother had taught her and was able to protect herself from Ginny's mental powers and managed to overwhelm her Niece before being forced to vanquish her with a curse that would curse her and all her future lives.

Astrid, after reclaiming the book, returned to San Francisco where she had settled after arriving from Russia, where her husband Dan and her three daughters were waiting for her.

Laura, Grace and Nora were witches like their Mother, but unlike her they loved magic and all of them were extremly focused on vanquishing demons. Laura had the power of cryokineis and telekinesis, Grace had the power to slow down molecules but not freeze them as well as the power to levitate and Paula had the power to divine the future through the use of a crystal ball and could astral project.

The three sisters together added well over a hundred pages of the book and the Underworld came to fear them and also what they meant, the three Charmed ones were meant to have all of Melinda Warren's original powers but these three sisters did not, which meant that they could not be the Charmed Ones that she spoke about and how powerful were they going to be if these three sisters were causing them such a problem?

As the underworld was worrying about this, Laura's husband who was an architect and Grace's husband who owened a building firm, planned and constructed a house which all the family could live in together, at least for a time.

Said family had grown, Laura had given birth to a daughter named Phoebe who shared her power of cryokinesis and could levitate, Grace had a daughter with her husband that she named Priscilla who like her Mother could slow down time and Nora had a daughter that she named Pearl who could manipulate heat and could divine the future in the same way that her Mother could.

The large family only had a short time together, as a massive demon attack was launched against the manor which ended with only Astrid and her granddaughters left alive. She raised them as best as she could, but she died when the cousins were still quiet young.

In order to pay the bills, the cousins turned the manor into a speakeasy to supply their friends and neighbours with alchol, while Priscilla busied herself with running the speakeasy itself, Phoebe was paid to take pictures of guests while Pearl selled spells and love potions.

The three cousins as a whole when had vastly different approaches when it came to hunting evil, while Phoebe and Priscilla were both dedicated to their destiny and their duty to innocents their younger cousin was not so dedicated, even before the warlock known as Anton came into their lives.

Anton was an evil warlock who had seduced Pearl away from the side of good, using a potion that would triple her power as well as influnce her towards evo; actions and deeds. Pearl came into conflict with her cousins, who were forced to curse her with the same curse that her Grandmother had used against her niece and Anton fled.

Years down the road, Phoebe would move out of the manor but stayed in close contact with her cousin and her husband Gordon. Priscilla and Gordon would have a daughter, Penelope Halliwell, who would also have a daughter named Patricia Halliwell who would have four daughters, Prue, Piper, Phoebe and Paige.

To learn more about them, please see Coming of the Charmed Ones.

End of Story.

Okay, so this really isn't a story as much as a referance work to some of my stuff in my Charmed: The Next Generation stories.

But, I do like it so I thought I would put it up here.

If you enjoyed this, then please leave a review.

With much love,

DiscordantSymphony